Turning down Keystone, a no-brainer
January 18, 2012 4:43 PM
When the Obama government turned down Canada's controversial Keystone XL pipeline on Wednesday, even the giant Gulf oil refiner Tesoro agreed it was an easy political decision for the White House.
Writing in a company email Tesoro's vice-president for government affairs, Stephen Brown, wrote, "no one who was planning on voting against the president would have been won over simply because of the approval of Keystone."
That little fact was surely overlooked by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper when he told Bloomberg News back in September that approving the Keystone extension, to bring Alberta's oil sands petroleum to U.S. refineries, was a "complete no-brainer" for the Obama administration.
Harper probably should have recalled that, in 2008, candidate Barack Obama won considerable support among independents, on the campuses, from greens and from those with climate-change concerns with the promise that his presidency would be a leader on environmental issues.
And Keystone strikes out prominently on that front. Not only is it a project that would make profitable Alberta's controversial (at least here in the States) oil sands, but the current plan has the pipeline going through the Nebraska Sandhills, an environmentally sensitive area that rests atop the state's main water supply.
In November, Trans-Canada Pipeline offered to change the route, but anti-Keystone demonstrators at the White House and across the country made it clear they had the numbers and the arguments that would make life difficult for Obama in an election year.
Unions and others who want the jobs the pipeline was offering will be put off by the "wink and the nod" they keep getting from the administration: that when Trans-Canada picks a new route that avoids the Sandhills and presents it for review, the administration will rule again.
When that happens - not until well after the election in November -- many believe the pipeline will be approved.
In the meantime, there are the Sunday talk shows to brace for and political battle stations to be manned.
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